“She comes,” whispered Franco.
Ivanov could see nothing of the girl among the mass of shoppers and stallholders. Having been alerted by his mafioso guide, though, he faded back into the shadows as arranged, hiding himself in the crawl space between two dwellings that almost met at the bend in the alley. Franco calmly strolled into the center of the road surface farther back in the alleyway and lay facedown on the cobblestones.
He heard the girl a few moments before he saw her. A lilting, singsong voice, but cracked at the edges with a note of distress. She was speaking to someone in Italian, throwing in the occasional word of Russian. Ivanov settled into a comfortable stance, holding the weighted pillowcase in his dominant hand, ready to strike.
Bedsheets ruffled as the laundry parted to let through the girl and her mark. Ivanov was as still as the dirty, red-washed walls around him now. The girl’s voice grew more frantic, and he saw her hand, one finger extended, pointing at the ground where Franco lay.
“Eccolo,” she said, sounding scared and upset, “e morto, tovarishch.”
Like a dream of a small, ragged angel of death, she moved into his field of view, jabbing her finger at the “dead” body and jumping up and down. She made sure to place herself on the other side of her companion, drawing his eyes away from where Ivanov had concealed himself between the two buildings. Good field craft. He wondered how often the girl had done this and what ruses she used to lure men into a trap when her older cousin was not available to play dead. It was hard to tell her age. She looked underfed and might have been anywhere between eight and twelve years old. But she was a good actress. She drew her prey into the killing field and finally Ivanov could see him in the gloom.
He was alone. A tall man, dressed in civilian clothes under his trench coat-one of the lapels of which, no doubt, the girl had already checked for the small red badge that marked him as an NKVD man. She led the stranger by the hand, leading him toward the “corpse.” He took one step forward, then stopped, seeming to realize where he was. But it was too late. His assailant was already emerging from the black shadows to his left.
Pavel Ivanov had seen this so many times before: the eyes going wide; the mouth forming an “O.” A sort of electric jolt that shot through the body as it flooded with adrenaline and made ready to flee or fight. All too late. The NKVD man only had time for dying, which he did quietly. The loudest sound would be the sickening wet crunch of his skull smashing onto the cobblestones after the killer blow.
Ivanov swung the heavy cosh in a short arc. A swift, vicious strike. He felt the mantle of bone collapse like an insect crushed underfoot. Blood spots, a few chips of cranial plate, and flecks of meat sprayed out toward the child, who merely stepped to one side as the black-clad foreigner dropped toward the ground. His body twitched and heaved as Ivanov grabbed him and whipped the twisted rope of the pillowcase around his neck to strangle what remained of his life out of the man. Little remained.
His bowels let go with a rich stink, and Ivanov cursed, causing the girl to smile.
“Quick, help me. I need his clothes before they are too soiled,” he said.
Having peeled himself up off the cobblestones, Franco first hurried over to his young relative, smiling and patting her on the head as if to congratulate the girl on a good report card. He handed over a small wad of American dollars and a couple of boiled sweets. The girl wiped the dead man’s blood spots off her face with one of the sheets hanging across the alleyway. She kissed the back of Franco’s hand and skipped off to find her friends or perhaps her family.
“A good girl, like I told you,” said the Roman, as he helped drag the body deeper into the alley, tugging off his trousers as he did so. Ivanov heard shouting and a crash from the market square. He tensed, but Franco shook his head, grunting as he heaved at the deadweight.
“A sweet treat for the pigs-a distraction on the other side of the piazza,” he explained. “You must hurry, Russian, this will give us a few minutes. Nothing more. They will be looking for this man soon.”
The onetime Spetsnaz officer was already stepping out of the clothes the old woman had brought him an hour ago. Franco was right: Cousin Carlo’s little girl had done well. The dead man was about his size, dressed in a dark-colored suit and shirt, and a black tie and ankle boots. As Ivanov undressed, Furedi stripped the corpse, grimacing at the fecal leakage.
“It is not too bad,” said Ivanov. “Everyone stinks here anyway … The Russians, I mean,” he added, when the other man frowned at him.
Only somewhat mollified, Franco searched the clothes for loot before handing the outer garments over to Ivanov. He took money, a fighting knife, some documents for himself or his bosses.
“I will need those papers,” Ivanov told him.
Franco considered this for a moment, before nodding. “Si. You will.”
The dead man’s clothes were a little tight on Ivanov, but they would do. And at least they weren’t overly stained with blood and gore. As he dressed, he could hear the sounds of some mild disturbance in the marketplace, Italian and Russian voices raised in anger.
“You are certain about this, my friend?” Franco asked. “If you do this, I cannot help you. Nobody from my family, not Marius, not my cousin Carlo’s little girl, will come with you. My family is large.”
“And helpful,” Ivanov said with a smile, as he did up the buttons on his new shirt. Absentmindedly, he flicked a small blob of gray matter off the collar of his trench coat. “Skarov has two companies of NKVD troopers in the tunnels looking for you and me now,” he continued. “I am better up here. And I still have work to do. Thank you, Franco.”
He put out his hand to shake and the Italian took it. The other man’s fingers were long and thin, but they gripped with the strength of a crushing machine.
“I shall rejoin Marius. No matter what happens up here, Russian, you should not try to follow us. You will be lost underground.”
“I know,” he said. “I will get myself back through the Wall. But my mission was the man in that hotel. I need to know whether he is dead, whether he left anything behind worth coming here for.”
“If we kill many Communists tonight, it was worth your coming,” Franco replied. He rolled the corpse up against the base of an apartment building wall and tossed Ivanov’s discarded clothes on top of it. “Be gone now, Russian,” he said finally.
“And the body?”
“It will be gone soon too.”
He walked.
He walked through streets devoid of any joy. Building up his mental map of the city on this side of the Wall. Taking refuge every now and then down blind alleys or in the entrances to deserted businesses. The farther north he traveled, the less he saw any evidence of urgency and alarm. Skarov was concentrating his search ever closer to the border with the free city, throwing hundreds of men into the hunt both above- and belowground.
Still, there was danger hereabouts. Without the protective magic of Franco Furedi’s presence to envelop him, Ivanov soon felt the dull glare of Roman hatred. They watched him from behind shuttered windows and twitching curtains. Their eyes burned dark, like cold embers with all the heat squeezed down beneath black layers of carbon. Dressed as he was, he walked the streets not just as a Russian but as an agent of Lavrenty Beria, a minion of the Great Satan, as the NKVD boyar had come to be known in this deeply Catholic and captive nation. An irony that amused the uptimer, in a grim fashion. Another piece of detritus that had drifted into the past and been taken up by the temps without regard for its origin.